Yet another article on impacts of poor data quality in healthcare. Apparently, medication errors (e.g., incorrecly transcribed prescriptions) kill 7000 people and conservatively incur costs of $3.5 billion per year.

I have written extensively about the value of developing a data standards program as part of a data governance framework, and so far we have convinced a number of clients as well. In fact, Knowledge Integrity is looking for a motivated individual to join our Data Standards team at one of our client sites. Click here for more information.

Over the past few days, news items such as this one have told the story of Terry Wallis, a man who, 19 years after entering a comatose state of minimal consciousness, emerged from that coma as his brain spontaneously rewired itself back into awareness. Cells in undamaged areas had formed new axons, establishing new connectivity around the damaged parts of his brain.

Two quick questions to ponder: Is this an unique event, with little expectation of recurrence? And how does this natural occurrence compare to computational self-organization?

The answer to the first question is that while this rewiring is rare, there are other documented occurrences, which may introduce some hope that scientists can better understand the process by which this phenomenon occurs, and whether it can assisted externally.

The answer to the second question does hold some challenges computationally. The brain rewiring is reminiscent of self-organizing programs, and even neural networks, which are programs intended to recreate the network structure of intelligence as part of an Artificial Intelligence initiative. Understanding what the brain can do naturally may help in exploring other ways to lead to automated "thinking." Embedding these kinds of utilities/services/agents within operational applications could be just one more way to incorporate business intelligence into ongoing business processes.

Any comments?